Sapphire HD 5670 1GB Review

Introduction:

The Direct X 11 capable cards are coming fast and furious to fit into each price point and performance niche. To this end the Sapphire HD 5670 is being unleashed to the world as a capable card to fill the mainstream price point right around $100. It is the 5th 5 series card released from ATI and its partners and is the only DX 11 card in this price bracket. As a card that is designed to go into mainstream boxes to use its compute capabilities to improve the overall experience by allowing many of the computing tasks to be offloaded to the GPU rather than having the CPU do the work allows the home user who does not have a high end gaming rig do the things they do most quicker such as encoding movies, editing photos watching high definition content either on the web or on the big screen in the home. As a mainstream card the gaming performance may not wow the true gamer but lets see what the Sapphire HD 5670 1GB video card has to offer.

Closer Look:

The front panel of the package has another iteration of Ruby poised for battle while the capabilities of the Sapphire Radeon HD 5670 are lined up along the top and bottom of the panel. The Arctic cooling, 1GB of GDDR5 memory,Eyefinity support, Native DisplayPort and HDMI connections,CrossfireX and Stream computing are all listed as a full feature set that mirrors the rest of the 5 series cards from Sapphire.The back panel describes each of the features listed on the front and then some. A listing of the awards Sapphires products have earned is to the left and Sapphires commitment to the earth is in the center with the note that the inner and outer packaging is made with recyclable paper products.

Removing the inner box from the outer cover reveals a cardboard package that has the recyclable logo on it. The inner packaging shows a sprayed cardboard liner that holds the HD 5670 and the accessory bundle.

The bundle of accessories that Sapphire includes is always a cut above the rest it seems like with all of the hardware and software needed to get you connected and running. You get the documentation and driver disk, a disk containing Arcsofts SIM HD IM client, a dual link DVI to VGA adapter, an HDMI to Dual link DVI adapter and a Crossfire bridge connection to round out the bundle. There is not a power cable included because the HD 5670 does not use that much power and will be powered straight through the PCIe bus connection.